Thinking in an Emergency Ward

This is a fragment, scribbled into the sand and light slab of miracles we call a phone. I’m sitting in a waiting room in the hospital while my youngest son is assessed by a paediatrician. My wife is in the with him- only one of us was allowed in. It is our 11th wedding anniversary today.

I’m not terribly worried, but she is, and we are both tired, our 9 year old was sick with pneumonia a week ago, and neither of us have slept much the last few weeks.

I’m in the hospital and my heart is babbling like a car alarm in the dead of night, remembering this feeling when my father the Old Man was slowly dying. All hospitals feel the same, the Emergency Department is the busiest place but there are cycles of sudden quiet, and the whole place pulses softly like a jellyfish swimming. Here and there are the sounds of silent machines, the shuffle of shoes on linoleum.

This is how most stories end in the hospital. Not with crash carts and sirens and electric shocks to the chest, but with an empty room, a crisp white bed, silence.

As I write these words a baby in a nearby consulting room starts to cry, a frail airless gasp and it slowly loses its potency. I am just thinking about the way babies use crying like a mantra to calm themselves when the PA system breaks out with the announcement “Paeds’ category 1 to resus.” Staff rush into the room behind me a door closes, the crying has stopped. Silence returns. My heart is grieving.

There’s an injustice in young suffering, and I think about the Old Man, and that though he died younger than the statistics for his generation, as an inveterate drug and alcohol abuser, he got a decent down of life at 69 years. He rang the alarm in his apartment and died somewhere between there and the hospital. I suppose they attempted resuscitation, though perhaps there is a difference in how energetic a paramedic will be when the patient is an old man with no legs. Maybe all lives are considered equally. Maybe a baby tightly is seen as deserving of more intensive effort. I don’t mean to impugne anyone, but I don’t know if I can say that my father deserved more life the way a child with leukaemia does.

He wishes he could hate someone for the death of his son. But who can you blame for a sudden death? He tried to hate God, but he doesn’t believe in God. He tried to hate all of humanity for being so fragile and ephemeral, but he couldn’t keep it up because hating everyone is the same as hating no one.
Augustina Bazterrica

Fragments, and I’m thinking about the Old Man, gone 9 years, soon to be joined by his brother in law. Stage 4 colon cancer has enveloped Uncle Franz. He is barely alive in that same hospital in Austria where the Old Man ended his being and became memory. Uncle Franz who would eat redecorated with me but only if he could carefully dredge his portion in an avalanche of fine sugar. He will die soon too, and my world will shrink a little more as I become the knowledge holder of my family.

Photo by Sudipta Mondal on Pexels.com

Hospitals are not where I imagine I want to die, because they are not places for dying in my opinion. Sitting here I feel the struggle for life, these edifices to health are founded on the belief that death is undesirable. I don’t know if my soul will tolerate the struggle of being stopped from leaving the vessel of my body. I think about the mountaineer Rob Hall, who died close to the summit of Mt Everest, how his body surrendered its last energy to the biting cold. His hubris made his passing a tragedy, leaving behind family and a pregnant partner. But to consider the direct way he was taken from his body has a beauty that may be missing when a nurse is cracking your ribs in a grey coloured room with no windows.

Everything will be fine, because the world exists, and will do so long after I am gone. The ward is quiet again, taking those soft breaths of subtle machines and voices murmuring behind soundproofed doors. I’m thinking about the Old Man and his last years spent in a similar building. I’m thinking about Uncle Franz on that journey now on the other side of the world. I’m thinking about my 6 year old, who’s just about to be discharged pending some blood test results. I’m thinking about the baby in the room behind me. I’m thinking about what we will cook for dinner, and what it feels like to die. Everything will be fine because the world exists.